Widening the net to improve conversion rates

As the new football season gets underway, bookmakers will be jostling for position to make their voices heard in what is the peak time to acquire new customers to their business.

The battle for sign-ups will be fiercer than ever this year after a summer without a major football tournament, as operators look to make the most of the opportunities that the new Premier League campaign will bring.

It’s the time of the year when marketing campaigns are given particular focus with the intention of snapping up new players keen to take up the best introductory offers. Whether you’ve signed up a high-profile brand ambassador, created a new strapline or are introducing a product that brings innovation to market, August is the month many operators really get behind their above-the-line activity.

Email-based marketing is still regarded as the go-to tool by many operators when planning conversion campaigns. Load up your email account and you’ll likely be greeted by hundreds of unread promotional emails along these lines, whether it is to encourage a deposit, a special offer or an enhanced odds accumulator.

The average opt-in rate for these email campaigns is around 40%, while click-through rates are estimated to be on average between 3-6%. As a result, you are failing to reach between 94-97% of your total customer base, who are either not reading or responding to your emails.

Users are inundated with messages from across many businesses and simply don’t have time to read each email they receive. And since email account providers introduced a separate tab for promotional emails, it’s even more difficult for firms to get their messaging across to the target audience.

Email campaigns still have their place, but it’s now time for operators to consider alternative messaging techniques that maximise customer reach, engagement and, crucially, conversion.
By supplementing email with second-generation tools such as web and mobile push notifications, as well as inboxes within native apps or on web, operators can now reach 100% of their entire audience for the first time.

Targeting anonymous users

New customer sign-up rates are at their highest when the new football season rolls into town. Huge numbers of these will be tempted to your website by advertising and email campaigns and will check out your markets and offers. Yet a significant number of them will then fall out of the conversion funnel by failing to register an account or follow up their interest with a transaction.

Acquisition campaigns across TV, paid media, search and sponsored advertisements drive visitors to the destination but ultimately the visitor needs to convert. Traditionally, operators have needed to pay to re-acquire these unknown users, or live in the hope they will return organically.

Not only is using paid-media retargeting expensive, it’s also an insufficient way of trying to re-engage with those anonymous users. One solution is to target anonymous players through second generation messaging tools, such as web push notifications. This is designed to widen an operator’s reach with players, at various stages of the conversion funnel, who have previously been unreachable.

Sophisticated messaging platforms give the CRM user the ability to build a cohort of anonymous visitors. This is achieved by assigning each unregistered visitor with an anonymous ID, enabling operators to target them based on their onsite activities and acquisition channel.

The ability to target these unknown users with a simple message such as “don’t forget to complete your registration”, or “there’s still time to claim your introductory £10 free bet” can provide firms with a competitive advantage, and importantly improve the reach of their conversion messages.

Capitalising on cohorts

The way in which customers engage with marketing like this has changed over the years, which means the delivery of a simple targeted email promotion to a list of customers is no longer as effective as it once was.

The click-through rates of these channels are declining, with users put off by broad brush messaging that lacks personalisation, and repetitive, generic types, such as “win a £10 free bet” or “20 free spins”, which they are likely to have seen on numerous occasions if they hold multiple accounts.

Traditionally, operators have segmented consumers based on demographics and interests. The problem with this, however, is your messaging fails to resonate with your entire audience as these can be too vague.

One solution to improve customer engagement and lifetime value is the use of cohorts that segment players based on betting patterns, the preferred channels in which they read messages and the time they are most likely to engage.

In a marketplace where differentiation is increasingly important, deploying cohorts to target consumers can play a major role in creating personalised content. Operators can target users with tailored messages around things like the football team they support or the sports they are most likely to bet on.

Not only do cohorts help to remove the expensive costs involved with paid for media re-targeting when acquiring new customers, they are also an effective tool when looking to retain customers.

By adding multiple data capture points to desktop and mobile websites, users of sophisticated marketing platforms can create a 360° view of the customer.

With this new-found visibility, reporting and campaign management, the back-end teams can create a big-data approach to the way in which operators engage with customers.

Measuring success

Inevitably, a major marketing campaign at this time of the year is going to see an increase in visitors to your site.

The spike in visitors or revenues following the delivery of an email or push notification may point to a content campaign’s success to many marketers. However, that rise in hits and bets could very well be coincidental or the result of activity elsewhere.

Unless you can pinpoint exactly how your customers consume the messages they receive, operators are unable to effectively measure the success of such campaigns. One solution to measure how effective a campaign is through direct attribution, which assesses each and every single message. This is effective because it not only allows operators to digest exactly how their content is being consumed by the target audience, it also enables operators to deliver the right message to the right user for future campaigns, while also getting a true ROI.

With the big kick-off just around the corner, operators must change their tactics around campaign delivery if they are to make a winning start.

Lance Standing is the general manager, EMEA at OtherLevels, a leading digital marketing platform provider. He has a wealth of experience in various senior business development and sales roles across a variety of industries, including retail, leisure and banking.